Something a ten year old Kira Izuru might dream of.

Untitled Part 1

There was a dirt path lined by thin, blackened trees. Their branches twirled and twisted like skinny tendrils reaching over his head.

The dirt path was endless. At some point, it had been a meadow. Izuru did not know at what point that was, or why it had metamorphosed into this charred forest--but he had known, outside the frame of his subconscious mind, that it used to be a meadow, like prerequisite knowledge. Then the fear that had blanketed him since the beginning of the dream curled tighter around his little heart. Somehow, knowing the meadow was a ghost made him more afraid than the gnarly tree branches that seemed to sneer and grab at him. He didn't know if that meadow ever existed. He didn't know why he was thinking of that meadow--whether it's something to be gained, something he'd lost, or something else altogether.

So he had the dirt path, and the ghost-meadow, and nowhere to go. But the only thing he could do was keep walking. Turning back was not an option--a strange sense of being scrutinised plagued his little ten-year-old mind, as though, if he turned back, he'd find something looking back at him. Chills crawled across his back, finding him at the dip of his spine. It's the same feeling one got when one went to bed and refused to check under the bed, having their parents do it instead.

Right, parents... He didn't have those anymore.

He kept walking. He walked on and on. His feet never seemed to get sore. Then the scenery changed, and the forest turned blacker. The trees were now interspersed. They had much thicker trunks. Their colour was so impenetrable, he couldn't see the patterns on their barks. Somewhere along his walking the sound of animals had died out (were they there, ever?) and he only noticed when his footsteps became silent too. When he looked up, a great, white tree stood in front of him. At its roots, a white-skinned person sat in a chair, tied down by chains of warding seals.

「 Your grave wouldn't be put here, 」it rasped, shoulder curling forward in a manner that would displace the shoulder-blade.

A brief vision of the Kira family estate vaguely surfaced on the white tree. Then the family burial grounds, where rows of gravestones proudly stood, and then to his parents', beautiful and large and smooth, but fenced, and in a quiet part of a forest.

His aunt had taken him there. Its memory haunted him like the memory of the ghost-meadow.

The person wheezed again, and twisted its back slowly, which creaked as it eventually faced towards the tree.「 Your grave... isn't here, 」it hissed,「 and neither will it be there... 」

The sound of a female voice speaking floated in. The black grass disappeared from under Izuru's feet, replaced by varnished floorboards. Powder-pink walls erected themselves a large radius from him. It was a celebration, he realised, and his relatives were gathered in a corner. He was standing in the centre of the room. His relatives were gathered in a corner.

「 Your grave doesn't belong to them... Your parents' grave... doesn't belong to them either... 」

He approached them, but they simply herded themselves away, like a gaggle of geese. He approached them again, and they herded themselves away again, and he approached them yet again and they herded themselves away readily yet again. His little fingers only touched the tail-ends of their flowy kimonos.

「 What are you doing here? 」One of the ladies asked, hiding her befuddled giggles behind her embroidered sleeve. She didn't make it obvious, but the frame of his subconscious recognised the intent.

He wasn't paraded around like the rest of his cousins. His parents were buried outside of the family compound. He'd known this for some time.

「 You are a child of the Kira family, 」the white-skinned person said, appearing tied to his chair in the middle of the celebratory function. 「 The connection... 」Its voice crumbled into something unsavoury. The room peeled away to reveal the forest again.

This person had no face. It breathed like it was continually gasping, and white smoke fanned in front of its open mouth. Its mouth was always open. But it was obstructed, covered by a thin, white cloth that was sucked in whenever he drew a painful inhale, and in hindsight the person shouldn't be white-skinned, rather wrapped from head to toe with a white cloth, but ten-year-old Izuru understood it as skin. So white-skinned it was, its fluid epidermis stretched over the orifices like burial cloth. Its eyes were empty sockets, which Izuru would instinctively recognise, and because the fabric there was sunken in just like the fabric covering its mouth. It writhed in a great, heaving mass tied to the rickety chair. Its limbs seemed to bubble. In some sense, that strange being looked liquid, boiling and curdling, resembling just barely enough the sensible form of a human. Izuru listened to it cough and bubble for the entire length of his stay.

「 Kira Izuru is my name, 」he said in every lapse of silence, and the white-skinned person laughed, curling his shoulder forward.

「 Child! Child. Kira Izuru is your name. 」